James

September 2000

WHERE MY COMPASS POINTS 220700

The world changed tonight, and I don't know where I am. I don't know what this
wasted, fragile feeling means. I've been courting my life with one agenda: to
make it better. But the cards are on the table. And I've been trumped to smithereens.

The world changed tonight. I felt it pierce them like ice, cold, cold ice. So
efficiently. So effectively.

I don't feel relief. Kind of, sort of, maybe. I feel worry and anxiety and fortune
and disappointment. I feel a relief of an unearthly kind, like I have been injured
or have lost something out the window in a tide of amazing, sweeping, guttering
emotion. I now have to face a reality so different, where he can't quite meet
my eyes, but he's trying. He's working it through.

But I've made myself feel unjustified, undeserving. Grateful for any shard of
understanding left on the floor. I am cowering, facing judgement, and pleading
benevolence.

I am joyous I think. Something so long in the making is bound to be ambivalent
for me. I told them. God. I did it. I actually told them. Why am I still running?
Why don't I want their questions?

It took it all to open that door, and now that I'm through, I'm adjusting to
the light. It was, is, the end of one race, and I'm panting and sweating and
numb and emotional because I don't know whether I have won or not. The panel
of judges is out. The jury is out. There is no verdict, and I'm alone in this
crowded courtroom. And I'll wake up with a start not remembering it-like a dream:
a weird, weird, colour-filled dream of tears and muscle and fear and clutching
at straws and collisions and groping in the fucking dark... and the steely mechanics
of it all. Steely pragmatism.

I have a headache.

But I'm still alive. God. I'm still alive. On the other side.

I'm here, and it's better than before. I am finding myself on this weird, weird
colour-filled road to finding myself. That's where my compass points. West to
the setting sun. Part of me. So central, so core, too meaningful for words,
so breathtaking and awesome I want to howl.

All but for the confusion and the struggle. Will they ever know the truth of
it? Or can they manage nicely with the version I give them? I don't know where
the truth is.

I'm just adjusting to the light. I'm scared. And maybe still alone, but not
as much. I opened a window tonight, a risk. And we're all standing around it,
mourning it, trying to look through it, pretending as if something has died,
wondering what this new view means... and looking at the one who just rammed
it open not quite blaming him, but close.

It's just huge. And I'm in for it all. That's where my compass points.